Quotes About Silence

So, what's the first step to changing norms? It's breaking the code of silence around the problem that always sustains the status quo.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. —MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

As people begin to feel unsafe, they start down one of two unhealthy paths. They move either to silence (withholding meaning from the pool) or to violence (trying to force meaning in the pool).

When you've gone to silence and are trying way too hard to convince yourself that you've done the right thing, you might want to examine whether you are intentionally minimizing the cost of not speaking up and exaggerating the risks of doing so.

Just because they don't hear the song (of the world) doesn't mean it's silent.

He looked up. His mouth stayed where it was and noise quit coming out of it. Yes, Asil thought, the other's awe soothing the feathers that had been ruffled by the wait, I am beautiful.

aside, Dan kept the gun

Finn had seen in the people he'd once contended with, and sometimes even among his own colleagues - a policy in which killing was the first option rather than the last, because lives counted for nothing against the security of guaranteed silence.

It is not only violent terrorists who induce fear as a means of communication. Intellectual terrorists are equally vile. Intellectual terrorists are emotional extortionists. These terrorists, who are often racists, sexists, classists, or religious bigots, employ the language of fear. They generalize and essentialize a people, reducing them to a phenomenon. They incite fear and terror toward their victims and force the victims into a horrified silence.

Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it. - Amir

some stories don't need telling

I opened my mouth, almost said something. Almost. The rest of my life might have turned out differently if I had. But I didn't.

A part of me was hoping someone would wake up and hear, so I wouldn't have to live with this lie anymore. But no one woke up and in the silence that followed, I understood the nature of my new curse: I was going to get away with it.

Gone. Vanished. Nothing left. Nothing said.

As far as I know, he never asked where she had been or why she had left and she never told. I guess some stories do not need telling.

No one has to know. No one would. It would be her secret, one she would share with the mountains only. The question is whether it is a secret she can live with, and Parwana thinks she knows the answer. She has lived with secrets all her life.

Not a word passes between us, not because we have nothing to say, but because we don't have to say anything - that is how, it is between people who are each other's first memories

I shook my head no. For minutes, neither of us spoke a word. It breathed between us, what he had said, the pain of a life suppressed, of happiness never to be.

I guess some stories do not need telling.

She was like the dust that clung to his shirt. She was in the silences that had become so frequent at the house, silences that welled up between their words, sometimes cold and hollow, sometimes pregnant with things that went unsaid, like a cloud filled with rain that never fell.

She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up into the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke silently on the people below - As a reminder of how women like us suffer, she'd said. How quietly we endure all that falls upon us

It would be erroneous to say Sohrab was quiet. Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it. Sohrab's silence wasn't the self imposed silence of those with convictions, of protesters who seek to speak their cause by not speaking at all. It was the silence of one who has taken cover in a dark place, curled up all the edges and tucked them under.

Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it.

Where I come from, one wrong look, one improper word, and blood is spilled. Where I come from, a woman's face is her husband's business only.